Pilsner Enzymes for a Bread Ale

Ingredients
1

Hello,

I’m new to brewing and I would like to seek your tips regarding an experimental recipe.

I live in a place where ready to use ingredients like malt and hops aren’t easily available.

I’ve made beer with self-made malted barley and I’ve been somewhere close to the desired taste of an ancient style ale. I mostly followed the Kellerbier recipe, modified.

Now I want to brew something very new and yet something very ancient - bread ale.

The aim is to get the smokey taste from a special eart-wood oven type of bread that is popular around here. When prepared on beech or hornbeam wood, this oven gives the bread a sublime taste.

Some people here do this, with addition of sugar to the bread-broth, but I obviously want to do better than this, so I malted some barley again and I ordered amylase enzymes from a German store.

The enzyme powder says “Pilsner Enzymes” and doesn’t give a full list of which amylase and pectinase enzymes it contains, and to what proportion.

My question to you guys is - does anyone have any experience with Pilser Enzymes? Will it help me break down the starch from the bread?

Also - if anyone has made some bread ale here - what would be the best way to chop it? I’m wary that if I crumble it down to too small fractions, they’ll escape from the brewing bag.

Since this is an old-world ale, I ordered German hops, Perle, it’s said to be good for bittering and for the aroma.
Since I don’t want this beer to taste hoppy, but just to have sufficient hops to balance the sweetness, I think of adding 15 grams of Perle to 20 litres of wort for bittering; I haven’t figured out how little I should add for the aroma, for the result to have a very dominant bread&malt taste.

Any suggestions are very welcome and appreciated.

Thank you in advance!

2

Curious where you are and what others normally do when they brew using the bread.

I don’t think pilsener enzymes is a common product name here but from what little I know it looks like it might be just amalyse which would be fine for your purpose. If the product you received was made in the EU there is a decent chance the manufacturer’s website has some kind of spec sheet on the product.

3

There was an article in the September/October 2015 issue of Zymurgy on making bread beer.  The article was called ‘Celtic-Germanic Bread Beer’.  You should check it out if you can.  They described breaking the bread in to pieces and and adding it to heated water.  Then stirring it with a paddle until it was like a porridge.  They then added a Pilsner malt to get the needed enzymes.  So it does sound like the enzyme powder you have should work.

4

Tbilisi, Georgia, a land of wine, where almost everyone in the villages and many city people too make their own wine. Most of them tastes s*** though.

We have neighbouring highland people called Ossetians, they’re language is proven to be descendant of anciant Scythian and Sarmatian - and so it their beer brewing tradition. Ossetians have a few words for beer and one of them is ælúton, which comes from Proto-Indo-European *helut- “a bitter drink”, which is also the root word for Germanic ale.

Some people might be interested in this historic introduction.
Anyways, those parts of Georgia, where there is an Ossetian cultural influence, people brew beer, and I have to admit I haven’t tasted that particular beer, but have heard that they do it with bread. I mentioned homemade wine - many Georgians don’t find it unrespectful to put water and sugar in their must, so the same story here - this local bread beer is made by brewing bread and then adding sugar and local wild hops to it. Spontanious fermentation is the only way drinks are made in villages.

Since I find it very cheap to use sugar directly, I want to use malt and enzymes, this latter being a compromise.

Do you think 6 kg of basemalt and 2 kg of breadcrumbs would do a nice gravity wort? Or would it be possible to increase the part of bread, since I use additional enzymes?

This is what I ordered, it’s Hungarian or something, I’ll have it delivered through Germany:

https://www.destillatio.eu/en/distillation/mash/amylase-enzyme-3-g-converts-starches-into-fermentable-sugar/a-11044/

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Thanks for the reference! I’ll look for it and use it to adjust the recipe!

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This doesn’t answer your question, but given what you are trying to do, I thought you might find this blog interesting.

This post on keptinis is what made me think of it:

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Man… I want a hunk of that bread in the picture!

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The enzyme should work well if mashed with the bread and water, and held at 65C for 20-30 minutes.  However the end result will probably be very dry with final gravity close to 1.000.  You might wish to blend the finished product in each cup when ready to drink using fruit juice or honey or something to sweeten it, if it tastes very dry.

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Thanks for providing this information. It’s really interesting stuff. I’m not surprised by the use of sugar which is fairly common for making table wines all over. The spontaneous fermentation for wine is also not too surprising. I am curious how they are spontaneously fermenting a bread beer because neither baked bread nor refined sugar are good sources of wild yeast. I wonder if it’s environmental inoculation or they have a way to transfer yeast from one batch of beer to the next. I’d also be curious to know whether the bread used is the same type of bread you eat or if they make a special kind of bread for brewing.

[quote]Since I find it very cheap to use sugar directly, I want to use malt and enzymes, this latter being a compromise.

Do you think 6 kg of basemalt and 2 kg of breadcrumbs would do a nice gravity wort? Or would it be possible to increase the part of bread, since I use additional enzymes?

This is what I ordered, it’s Hungarian or something, I’ll have it delivered through Germany:

https://www.destillatio.eu/en/distillation/mash/amylase-enzyme-3-g-converts-starches-into-fermentable-sugar/a-11044/

[/quote]

Definitely looks like it’s just amylase enzyme. I’m not sure at those volumes you even need to add enzymes. Most base malt has more enzyme than it needs to self-convert, usually by several times. Not knowing the diastatic power of the base malt you have I did a quick calculation using conservative numbers. You should be ok going even as high as half bread and half base malt without needing to add enzymes.

I would mash for longer than normal (75-120 minutes) and test conversion with an iodine test. If you don’t have good conversion then I would add enzymes and mash for another 15-20 minutes to give them time to finish the job.

10

Thanks for your thorough reply!

I can’t say this with a 100% certainty, but with my general knowledge of rural Georgian cooking and brewing habits, I can say that:

They don’t bake special bread, the stories I’ve heard about it always involved a source of bread - like a big wedding celebration, or a funeral meal - whenever a fair amount of this traditional bread is baked and then left untouched by the feast, women brew beer.

I have to add that in soviet times, there were sugar-beets grown there in a mass scale and I’ve also heard adding those to mashing - Russian kvass-making does this too - though I’m not sure whether this is an old tradition or a new one like adding table sugar.

But they must be also using malt, don’t know the shares, but these villages also have a tradition making barley malt, so there’s some malt and hence maltose, this would start the wild yeast.
I don’t believe there is a culture of preserving yeast anywhere in Georgia, thy only culture people store and nurture here are the local yoghurt bacteria.

I am now culturing some yeast from a kombucha colony that appeared in apple juice on it’s own and makes very nice kombucha, tastier then another scoby I ordered on ebay. I put some brew in hopped sugar solution, the hopps killed the bacteria, as anticipated, and the yeasts are showing progress on fermenting that sugar; I’ll see what the end-result tastes like when the airlock stops bubbling =D

[quote]Definitely looks like it’s just amylase enzyme. I’m not sure at those volumes you even need to add enzymes. Most base malt has more enzyme than it needs to self-convert, usually by several times. Not knowing the diastatic power of the base malt you have I did a quick calculation using conservative numbers. You should be ok going even as high as half bread and half base malt without needing to add enzymes.

I would mash for longer than normal (75-120 minutes) and test conversion with an iodine test. If you don’t have good conversion then I would add enzymes and mash for another 15-20 minutes to give them time to finish the job.

[/quote]

I think of going 40% Malt and 60% Bread. With lots of protein and all the other rests for all the needed time. I like your tip, if the gravity isn’t nice enough at the end, just use the enzyme-help for that occasion^^

Something like this:

For 10 litres of ale.

1.1 kg Basemalt
1.6 kg roaster and crumbled bread

Perle hops for bittering - 20 grams, 1 hour
Perle hops for flavouring - 5 grams, 10 minutes

As for yeast, I have US05, S04 and S-33 available. I don’t want the yeast to interfere in the tasting of the bread flavor, so I think of using US05 - do you think this is a good choice?

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Oh, good to know that, thanks!
I want to have a sweet-tasting ale, so residual sugars will be given by the basemalt =D

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This has been an interesting thread, thanks all for posting. OP: re: leftover bread, there is a commercial project doing this: https://www.toastale.com/ They contract/partner-brew, perhaps they or one of their breweries can answer some questions.

With 60% bread, you may find a lautering aid helpful, like rice hulls or wheat straw. Or whole hops, even spent hops from a previous batch.